July 2001

That's not all, folks: SN editors recall two decades of UCAR history

Four writer/editors who each have overseen Staff Notes
Monthly at some point in the last 23 years sat down recently to
trade stories. We couldn't resist the opportunity to hear from
these chroniclers of the evolution of UCAR and NCAR, two of whom
were soon to depart.

It was the last week at UCAR for Carol Rasmussen (SN
editor 198789 and departing editor of the UCAR
Quarterly), who is now focusing on volunteer work and
family.

Sally Bates, SN editor pro tem this past February
through May, was looking forward to resuming the retirement she
began last fall. Sally edited SN from 1978 to 1987, then joined
Unidata, heading up the program's publications and Web presence
among other tasks.

Bob Henson was winding up the last days of his 12-year
stint as SN editor and looking forward to taking the helm of the
Quarterly. (Incoming SN editor David Hosansky is profiled in
the sidebar on page 7.)

Lucy Warner, director of UCAR Communications, was the
only one at the table not changing job descriptions this spring.
Lucy stood in for Sally at SN for a year in the mid-1980s.

Back in the day . . .

For many years, SN was a weekly publication. When Sally took
charge in 1978, it ran feature articles plus all the listings now
contained in This Week at UCAR. New to Boulder, Sally had
been working freelance after serving as an editor of Saturday
Review of the Sciences in San Francisco.

LW: When Sally came in, she created principles for what we did and
did not cover and built a philosophy for Staff Notes as a
serious vehicle that will cover the science but won't do recipes,
that will cover retirements but [not letters from retirees]. All
that got laid down by Sally, and it's still in place.

SB: I came from a magazine. If you don't do audience analysis and
you don't figure out what it is you're putting out and why, you're
in deep trouble very quickly. . . . I had worked at
Natural History magazine and then at Saturday Review,
and [at both] we talked about audiences all the time, so it was a
very natural thing to do.

When Sally arrived, SN was being typeset on an IBM Selectric
typewriter, and the newsletter came off the presses at NCAR's
former in-house print shop. In the mid-1980s, before production
shifted to a Macintosh environment, SN briefly used a word-
processing system created by the former Boulder-based firm
NBI.

SB: It took about a day and a half to do the layout . .
. so you would have one day or maybe a day and a half to
write a story. Then you had to go through the copy-editing process
and [cut-and-paste] the layout. So it was a very tight schedule.

LW: And it wasn't a full-time job, so you really had to race.

Carol, whose experience included a stint as a reporter at the
Newark Star-Ledger along with magazine writing and book
editing, was hired in 1983 as a copy editor. When Sally took six
months' leave in 1984, Lucy, another experienced writer who had
worked in New York and London, was hired as a term employee. Lucy
and Carol soon learned that they'd both worked for the same
publishing house, R. R. Bowker, in New York.

LW: We would have been around the corner from each other if we'd
been there at the same time.

CR: She was at School Library Journal, and I was at
Library Journal.

Taking a break from SN, Sally edited the 1984 NCAR annual
report. It was the first one that included color images inside as
well as on the cover. The memorable black-and-red cover photo by
Charlie Semmer spotlighted the helium-neon laser of the tunable
laser absorption spectrometer. There was also a graphic showing
four different resolutions of the NCAR community climate
model.

SB: The other thing in that report I really loved was this graphic
of what the grids [in the model] were. It's still my
favorite. . . . It sure shows you what you're talking
about when you talk about model resolution.

Longevity and institutional glue

CR: [After] 18 years, I've interviewed the same people any number
of times. HIRDLS is going to be launched in 2003; I wrote it up
when John Gille first got the grant to pursue it from the NASA EOS
program, which would have been, say, '85. So over the years you
pick up quite a bit of background knowledge. When you interview
people again, they know they don't have to start from zero.

Sally recalled bringing the cover of an NCAR annual report
featuring an image from HAO to an interview with a director in
another division. When he asked her what it was, recalls Sally, "I
suddenly realized the scientists were equally isolated from each
other," and that SN had a role to play in improving that. She also
recalls stopping by a balloon facility while on vacation in the
South Island of New Zealand.

SB: Marcel Verstraete ran a balloon facility in New Zealand for
NCAR, so I stopped by to see him when I was there in 1984. He was
wonderful to me and my family! Besides the balloon launches, Marcel
was taking air samples for ACD. He would go out on this little
beach, out in the middle of nowhere, with his vacuum bottles. He
invited me to come with him. He was sending his vacuum bottles back
to [long-time ACD scientist] Leroy Heidt. Well, I'll never forget
Leroy saying, There's a huge climate change coming here. I can see
it already [from Verstraete's vacuum bottles]. When [global change]
first came up, people kept saying, Nah, nah, nah. And Leroy kept
saying, Oh, yeah.

BH: I started in 1989. And '88 was the big [year for global
warming]. Jim Hansen went to Congress, and Time did a special issue
and visited NCAR.

CR: Nuclear winter was [big news] right when I started.

The biggest structural change on Bob's watch was the 1994
transformation of SN from a weekly to a monthly, accompanied by
creation of This Week at UCAR as an electronic newsletter
for the time-sensitive announcements.

BH: We thought hard about it, did an analysis, and figured out that
what made sense was not to go completely electronic, because we
were doing fairly long features at times, and we got the sense
people didn't want to read that long stuff [on line]. At this point
we didn't even have the Netscape browserwe only had Mosaic.
But, obviously, it didn't make sense to keep printing a thousand
copies of the announcements that could be electronic. [The change]
took a little while for people to get used to.

Parting thoughts

SB: One of the things that I have enjoyed most about NCAR is the
fact that it has a very broad diversity of people and it has the
nicest people in some of the weirdest places.

Carol will miss the "eureka" aspect of talking to scientists
here.

CR: You go in and you interview a scientist and they've done
something they're really excited about. They start talking louder
and louder, and they start gesturing. And you get it then. It's
being in on the excitement of this discovery, people who are
figuring things out that nobody else has ever figured out before,
and just getting a chance to see into that world of scientific
creativity.

LW: That's what drives this institution, really. And that's what I
love most about working here.

SB: It's been a thrill, a real thrill.

CR: Every once in a while, a scientist says to me, "You know, I've
always tried to explain to my brother-in-law just what it is I do,
and I never was able. I gave him your article, and now he
understands."

That's what we're here for. That's our reward.



Meet Staff Notes Monthly's new editor

David Hosansky. (Photo by Carlye Calvin.)

A recent Colorado transplant with a stellar background in writing
and editing takes the helm of Staff Notes Monthly beginning
next issue. David Hosansky earned two Pulitzer Prize nominations
during his early-1990s tenure at the Florida Times-Union in
Jacksonville, where he covered state politics and finance. From
1994 to 1998, David specialized in environment, agriculture,
transportation, and science topics as a writer for Congressional
Quarterly. Freelancing since then, he's written The
Environment A to Z, a reference book for CQ Press, and produced
articles and newsletters on science and public policy for the World
Bank, World Resources Institute, and Brookings Institution.

A native of New York City, David earned a bachelor's in psychology
at Brandeis University and a master's degree at Northwestern
University's Medill School of Journalism. He moved to Lakewood from
Washington, D.C., in 2000.

"I'm looking forward to joining the staff and writing about the
people who work here," David says. "I really like the NCAR-UCAR
emphasis on teamwork. And I'm excited about the opportunity to
learn more about climate, air pollution, and other topics." David's
interest in environmental science dates back to childhood,
"memorizing such arcane statistics as the hottest temperature ever
recorded on Earth." (For the record, it's 136°F or 58°C,
measured on 13 September 1922 at El Azizia, Libya.) David can be
reached at
hosansky@ucar.edu,
ext. 8611.